The Joys of Improvisational Carpentry

It's been 35 years or so since I last framed houses and built decks for a living, and I'm a thousand percent sure I've lost some of my skills over that time. I've really not done anything more complicated since then than building a small wooden deck for use on a mobile home.

But this morning, I was flummoxed until I had a "smack your forehead and say DUH" moment.

In normal commercial construction, squaring and leveling is pretty easy. The site is already leveled out reasonably before the footings are poured and then the framing crew (me) comes in. As you lay out and nail beams and joists and such, you naturally check here and there to make sure everything is 1) square and 2) level, but if your dimensional lumber is straight and cut square at the ends, etc., it's not complicated or difficult to get it right and correct it if something comes up.

I seemed to be getting weird variances of level-ness internal to the decking for the tent, which I've got about halfway laid out and covered, and it took me a little bit to figure out that:

USED PALLETS ARE NEITHER NECESSARILY SQUARE NOR NECESSARILY INTERNALLY LEVEL

Smack forehead. Duh!

The "square" part isn't much of a problem. I just butt the sheets of plywood against each other tightly, make sure the edges match, and I'm good to go.

But for the "level" part, I'm not nailing that stuff down to 2 x 6 joists that I've already leveled. I'm nailing it down to pallets of varying age and varying wear, some of which may have chunks gouged out of their stringers, on which one deckboard might be slightly thicker or thinner than the others, etc. Even if I level each pallet individually, a pallet that's level at the center may be 1/8" higher at one end, etc.

I'm doing a certain amount of shimming, tearing rogue slats off, etc., but ultimately the deck is going to be slightly off-level in various places. The only way I'll be able to correct that is internally -- different numbers of layers of rug, adjusting desk legs, etc.

Which is fine. Using discarded pallets and a plywood cover is saving me somewhere around $1,000 in material costs and doesn't entail TOO much extra labor. Since I only expect the deck and tent to remain usable for 3-5 years, I'd rather have the money than a beautiful deck that would have to be repurposed or torn down when I move on to the next "home office outside the main house" experiment.

Could Path Dependence Thwart AI Advancement?

I have no idea why I woke up thinking about this this morning, but a few hours later I still find the question interesting.

The old story, which you've probably heard, bullet-pointed:

• Roman war chariot axles were built wide enough to be stable when pulled by horses -- about 4'8".
• Roman roads were built wide enough to accommodate Roman war chariots and developed ruts approximately that far apart.
• Everyone else building a wagon or cart used the same axle width so that the wheels would track along the ruts.
• English mine tram rails just adoped the same wagon width, because that's the way things were.
• The Stockton and Darlington Railway (the first steam locomotive railway) stuck with that gauge because that's the gauge craftsmen were used to working with, and it became the standard rail gauge everywhere.
• Railroad tunnels were slightly wider than that gauge to accommodate both tracks and cars.
• The space shuttle's solid rocket boosters had to fit on those railway cars and get through those tunnels, so in a very real way the size of space rockets was dictated by the width of a Roman chariot-pulling horse's ass.

That's the go-to example of "path dependence" -- past choices tend to constrain future actions. It's a form of inertia: Here's the direction I've been going in, so here's the direction I'll keep going in.

The big deal with artificial intelligence models is getting to the point where one model designs the next, better, model.

But what if there are conventions built in from the get-go that each future model continues adhering to when designing its successor model because reasons, and what if those conventions mean that some leap, jump, or left turn doesn't get made even though it would produce a breakthrough while the constrained path eventually hits a dead end?

Wordle 1894 Hint

Hint: As "steer" is to beef, today's Wordle is to chicken.

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: C